The Premise

A competitive typing pistol duel for two players in local multiplayer! 
Hit the prompted keys when they flash to load your fiddly gun, and when the clock strikes noon, hit your corresponding CTRL key to fire! 
Played on one keyboard with two players, so fight over the buttons to honour your duty!

Built for Ludum Dare 36, I Shall Duel Thee At Dawn is an experimental game put together in just under 48 hours. The game was then polished up over 2 months before its current release onto Itch.

 The process for designing and implementing a game in under 48 hours was quite undefined. We aimed for something achievable. In this case we wanted music, sounds, graphics and a working 3 round game structure where one player would be declared the overall winner. We were’nt worried about finesse in the mechanics as the Jam was about the fun of making the project. After that, my artist went to work on all of the assets needed for the project while i put together a basic loop for the main game. This involved a mechanic where each player would have a letter on the keyboard to press. Once they had pressed 9 of these, a big exclamation would pop up telling them to press the control key on their 'side' of the keyboard to shoot their weapon. We created a corner case where if both players were quick enough their bullets would bounce off each other and they would have to keep racing. Finally i implemented all the required menus to get into the game, a basic win screen and an instructions screen. We finished the initial prototype in about 42 hours. This left us six hours to refine the mechanics. The initial sprint allowed us to prototype a number of ideas which we refined over the next 2 months before final release, such as additional game modes and a more refined keyboard mechanic players were more comfortable with.

The initial challenge faced in the project was the time required to build the prototype. Since we were constructing it in the form of a competition entry, the constraints on how long we could spend on each mechanic were quite tight. This created a tight an refined project goal. Conversely due to the nature of my development team, once the original weekend was over and we were into the polishing two months, other commitments intruded on my teams ability to actually work on the project. This was particularly noticeable with the final art pass as my artist was simply unable to create the assets needed for the final game and the products presentation suffered as a result. Still, it was an important lesson to learn and contributed to a tighter more controlled production schedule for future projects.